The brain is an energy-conserving system.
When something requires effort and doesn't come with a guaranteed return, it gets tagged as be cautious.
That tag often shows up as... yuck. I don't like it.
- Sometimes that signal is protecting us from real harm.
- Sometimes it's just signaling unfamiliarity.
Both can feel the same to us.
I've been noticing something lately:
When we see someone uncomfortable... a kid, a colleague, a friend, ourselves... there seems to be a belief that the empowering move is to name the discomfort and then push it away or avoid it.
There's real truth in this.
Interoceptive awareness... knowing what feels off in our body... is a skill worth honoring.
But here's where it gets tricky.
The same "I don't like it" can mean very different things:
- Something that could actually harm us
- Something unfamiliar that might expand us
The fast, energy-conserving systems can't always tell the difference.
They run a quick scan, make a binary call, and move on.
The slower, more metabolically expensive networks...
....the ones that project forward in time and track long-term patterns
... need more space to enter the conversation.
When we treat all discomfort as a signal to avoid or eliminate, we miss:
- The capacity to sit with unfamiliarity long enough to know what it really is
- The chance to widen the range of what our nervous system can navigate
We narrow our range instead of expanding it.
Empathy isn't the problem.
Wanting to relieve someone's discomfort... or our own... shows we care.
What's missing is the question underneath it:
Is this discomfort signaling harm?
Or is it signaling the potential for growth?
The potential for expanding the range of what we know we can handle, survive, navigate?
That one question opens up so much more terrain for the people we're guiding... and for ourselves.
In the next article, I'll be sending you something that picks up right where this leaves off.
Once we can tell the two kinds of discomfort apart...
what does it actually take to move toward the kind that expands us?
That's a conversation about the neuroscience of bravery and courage.
And a big part of both is learning to read our own systems and signals in ways that keep us open to the information and intelligence they're offering... rather than reacting to them as something to push away.
More tomorrow.
Wishing you moments of bravery for yourself and inspiring bravery in others this week,
Stefanie
P.S. Inside Teach the Nervous System, I share a multidimensional map for what's actually happening when discomfort shows up... so we can move beyond simple like/dislike reads of our experience and offer the same nuance to the people we work with.
If you want a richer language for this, that's where the work lives → Teach the Nervous System
